hey welcome back guys so back behind me back there is my new computer it's a mid
2012 15-inch non-retina MacBook Pro and we're gonna put it through its paces and
see if it can hold its own in 2018 and beyond, so here we go. Alright so like I
said this is a mid 2012 MacBook Pro it's got a 2.6 gigahertz quad-core i7-3720QM
processor. When I got the machine it had eight gigs of 1600 megahertz DDR3
RAM it came with a 500 gigabyte 5200 rpm drive, which was absolutely painful and
that's one of the first things I swapped out on this machine. This model has
two graphics cards; it's got the integrated HD 4000 graphics and it's got
1.5GB for that, but it also has a discreet Nvidia GT650M with
a dedicated 1GB of RAM for that and it's running High Sierra.
Like i said when i got this machine it just had the 500 gigabyte 5200 RPM drive
i can't say that without laughing because that thing is so slow these days
and it had eight gigabytes of ram so the first thing I did was I swapped out that
hard drive and I put in a 500 gigabyte SSD drive and then I also bumped the 8
gigs ram up to 16 gigs of 1600 ddr3 ram opening these things up and swapping the
RAM and the hard drives and stuff is so easy and I really of all the things
Apple's done I really wish they still did this you
just unscrew some screws on the bottom pop the bottom plate off and you have
access to basically anything that you'll need to swap out you can even swap out
the battery it's not super easy but it is doable so looking at the machine
along the left side is the MagSafe charging port this is another thing I
wish they still had Gigabit Ethernet port firewire 800 port a thunderbolt
slash mini DisplayPort so it's a thunderbolt port you can also just plug
a standard mini display cable in there it has two USB 3.0 ports and that's an
important difference between the 2012 model and the 2011 model 2011 only had
USB 2 2012 is when they first started doing the USB 3.0 it's also got a SD
card reader and audio line-in and out along the right side there's no ports
you just have the the laptop lock and the SuperDrive or DVD drive so the
screen on this thing is actually really really nice even by today's standards is
really clear it's very bright the viewing angles are
great it's not the Retina display so the resolution on it is really low it's 1440
by 900 which sounds ridiculously low but it's weird because I don't know if it's
the way the operating systems designed I've never had an issue with that
resolution I thought it would drive me crazy I've used laptops with you know
1366 by whatever it is resolution and I just drives me crazy I can't even use
them but for some reason on this MacBook the resolution has not been an issue for
me alright so let's get into the performance a little bit and I was
actually super super surprised on this on day to day activities web browsing
you know using your word processors all that stuff it works flawlessly and I'm
not surprised about that even a five-year-old Windows machine will work
just fine with that where I was really blown away is the editing so I was able
to edit 4k video on this you know six-year-old machine with virtually no
problem Final Cut Pro definitely works the best it's smooth scrubbing
everything was just completely smooth the only thing is I had to have a little
there was a little delay when you add a transition you have to wait for it to
render but it's only just you know two or three seconds the scrubbing of the 4k
was just totally smooth they didn't have to use any proxies or anything in Adobe
Premiere it was not quite as smooth but I was still able to scrub through the
video do my cuts play it back not a problem at all worked just great and
DaVinci Resolve as well work just fine I didn't have to use transcoding in any of
those pieces of software Premiere and DaVinci Resolve were a little choppy err
then then Final Cut Pro was Final Cut Pro was just buttery smooth and it those
are what the videos right off my lumix g7 camera so I was completely completely
blown away with that much better than I ever
thought it would be on you know a six year old laptop alright so we got to
talk about gaming right so I'm only going to talk about Mac OS gaming you
can do you know boot camp and load windows onto this machine and you're
gonna get better performance in Windows with the gaming than you are in the Mac
OS I was not gonna go through it because this is a five year old machine it's got
a 650 M video card in there so it's not I I didn't buy it for a gaming machine
so I'm only gonna talk about the Mac OS gaming so we got to talk about minecraft
first because if I don't I'm gonna get all kinds of questions
minecraft runs just fine no problem you know that's again to be expected the
650m video card is plenty enough for for Minecraft and then some steam games I
tried as well there's one that I really like it's called oxygen not included
that works totally fine no stuttering anything like that so so lower graphics
games like that work great if you're talking about you know first-person
shooters you know a little more graphically intensive games you gonna be
able to play them like I played seven days to die I had to set everything
super super low and then I was able to get above thirty frames per second and
make it playable looked like crap but it was playable so again this isn't a
gaming machine and if you really do want a game on it
load Windows in boot camp switch over to Windows you're gonna get better
performance now in addition to just play in the games on the device itself you
can also stream now there's a couple ways you can stream you can use the
steam in-home streaming and with the solid Wi-Fi on this and especially views
the gigabit connection it works great my gaming machine is a Windows machine this
is a Mac laptop but it doesn't matter because it's just streaming it doesn't
care what the the server and the client is everything worked great over my home
network you know there's very little latency with steam in-home streaming and
everything just worked fine now the next thing I want to talk about
is the NVIDIA GeForce now GeForce now and this is
right now so if you're watching this go check it out because pretty soon they're
gonna start paying for it but GeForce now is a game streaming service so
basically what you do is you create an account you log in and then you can link
that GeForce now service to your steam account and then you can have access to
all the Steam games that you've purchased and there's even some nam non
Steam games in there like Fortnight is in there that's not available on Steam
so what happens is these games play and process on the Nvidia servers with their
monster video cards or monster specs and all the the video is streamed to you and
your clicks and keyboard presses are streamed back it's really low latency
and for most games it's totally fine you're not going to want to do any
competition on this and things like I tried fortnight and I also tried pub G
and in addition to just sucking at these games there was a little bit of latency
that caused me to miss some shots nothing horrible definitely still
playable but you can just notice a slight difference versus playing it like
through the steam in-home streaming but it's fantastic what they can do the only
thing about the services you need a monster internet connection and it has
to be fast and stable but if you have that it works great alright so there you
go guys, a 2012 MacBook Pro who would have thought in 2018 it would still be a
viable option. It does 4k video editing plays a few games and day to day
activity it just kicks butt that screen is really nice you can output output to
a monitor get 1440p which honestly I have a 4k monitor and I always set my
resolution to 1440 anyway because otherwise everything just gets too small
so for me this was absolute sweet spot the 2012 year 2011 you only have USB 2.0
you only have the HD 3000 graphics and then you have the slower dedicated
graphics cards if you get the model with that in 2013 you start using some of
those user-accessible parts you lose access to that and then you know 2013
and then on beyond you start losing ports and stuff
too so 2012 is that sweet spot if you're looking for a Mac you may want to
consider checking out one of these again I got it for 500 bucks and then the
upgrades I put in a hat on hand but those upgrades wouldn't be that
expensive anyway if you bought them outright and I'm actually really happy
with this purchase and I definitely recommend it if you're looking to get
your feet wet in the Mac OS which is a fantastic operating system so thanks so
much for watching guys I appreciate you stopping by again please come see me on
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